Friday, April 07, 2006

LeakGate: A Story "The New York Times" Wishes Would Just Go Away

By MARC McDONALD

Let me see if I understand this correctly:

Court papers say that George W. Bush authorized Dick Cheney's former top aide to divulge classified intelligence data to a New York Times reporter in an effort to defend Bush's decision to go war against Iraq.

A newspaper in New York City broke this story on Thursday.

No, The New York Times didn't break this story. It was another newspaper in New York City.

Something called The New York Sun.

What's even more bizarre is that The Sun is a hard-core conservative paper, along the lines of The Washington Times.

How is it that The New York Times would let itself be scooped by its much smaller New York City rival---especially on a story of Watergate-like magnitude? After all, The New York Times fancies itself as America's "newspaper of record." And, in any case, it has vastly more resources, reporters, and clout than the Sun.

I'd suspect that in the end, the whole LeakGate story is one that The New York Times just wishes would go away.

After all, no matter how The New York Times' head honchos try to spin it, the whole Judith Miller mess is an enormous black mark on the paper's once lofty reputation.

It's a shame that The New York Times hasn't devoted much attention to LeakGate, particularly when you consider the enormous amount of attention the paper gave to Whitewater (a story that the Times broke in a massive investigative series in 1992).

After all, LeakGate is a real story---one of the biggest White House scandals in decades---whereas Whitewater turned out to be a complete non-story. Even Ken Starr eventually admitted that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair.

Unfortunately for The New York Times---and the Bush administration----I'd suspect that LeakGate isn't a story that's going to go away any time soon.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thank God for watchdog sites like Media Matters. As bad as Big Media is in this country right now; imagine if there were no watchdog sites out there. Lots of Americans are misinformed on the issues of the day---but it'd be much worse if it weren't for the watchdog sites out there.

Lets face it, the supposedly "liberal" New York Times never liked Clinton, period. They even gave a scathing review to Clinton's "My Life" autobiography (which was actually one of the better presidential autobiographies ever written).

Morons! You know who you are. The president is the head of the executive branch. It is on his authority alone that all things in the executive branch are classified or declassified. He needs no ones permission. Just ask Bill Clinton. He declassified a ton of national security documents. He needs no purpose, excuse or permission. He’s the man!

The New York Times may well lean left on some issues, such as gay marriage. But I challenge anyone to find a pro-labor story that has run in the Times in the past decade. The Times always can be counted on to take the pro-business, pro-globalization, pro-"free market" view on any business story. In any union strike action, the Times will always predictably take the side of management.

.

About This Blog

Welcome to BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com, the progressive political blog of Marc McDonald. A Texas journalist, McDonald worked for 15 years for several newspapers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, before he quit his day job and set up shop in cyberspace in 1995. McDonald's articles have appeared in a number of popular progressive Web sites, including Crooks and Liars, The Reaction, Buzzflash.com, Salon.com, OpEdNews.com, The Neil Rogers Show and The Raw Story. McDonald's Web articles have also been featured and reviewed by various national and international media, including CNN Headline News, the BBC, CBS, the Washington Post, USA Today and many more. On June 3, 2011, I was interviewed on the progressive radio program, "Voices at Work." Go here to hear my interview with host Ron Gonyea. I am always available for media interviews on progressive issues. Contact me here.